Neural network sorts the blockbusters from the flops

Will the 3-hour special-effects-loaded remake of King Kong be a box office smash or a complete turkey? For movie producers, getting such questions right can be worth millions, and now they have a computer system to help them work it out before a film is even made.

The idea is based on the findings of entertainment industry market researcher Edith Bodnar, who while at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1998 came up with the idea of training a type of software package called an artificial neural network to learn the key factors that influence a movie's likely success. Now the computer expert Bodnar asked to investigate the idea, Ramesh Sharda of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, has reported encouraging results of a five year trial in the journal Expert Systems with Applications (vol 30, p 243).

Using data on 834 movies released between 1998 and 2002, Sharda found ...

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